A Political Philosophy of Self-Defense

In his 1964 speech “Communication and Reality,” Malcolm X said: “I am
not against using violence in self-defense. I don’t call it violence
when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence.” Earlier that year, he
made a similar point in his Harlem speech introducing the newly founded
Organization of Afro-American Unity: “It’s hard for anyone intelligent
to be nonviolent.”

To portray self-defensive violence as natural, in no need of
justification, or as so commonsensical that it could barely be called
violence has a depoliticizing effect. Since the goal of Malcolm X’s
speeches was to undermine critiques of armed black resistance, this
effect was intentional. For good reasons, he was attempting to normalize
black people defending themselves against the violence of white rule.
When Malcolm X did speak of self-defense as a form of violence, he
emphasized that it was lawful and an individual right. In his most
famous speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964), he explicitly stated:
“We don’t do anything illegal.” This was also, of course, how the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense justified its armed shadowing of police
in Oakland in the late 1960s: it was the members’ Second Amendment right
to bear arms and their right under California law to openly carry them.

When conditions are so oppressive that one’s self is not recognized at all, self-defense is de facto insurrection, a necessary making oneself known through resistance.

To develop a critical theory of community defense, however, we need
to move beyond the rhetoric of rights or the idea that all
self-defensive violence is quasi-natural or nonpolitical. The
self-defense I discuss in this essay is political because the self
being defended is political, and as such it requires both normative and
strategic considerations. This project seeks to articulate the dynamics
of power at work in self-defense and the constitution of the self
through its social relations and conflicts.

Because communities of color defend themselves as much against a
culture of white supremacy as they do against bodily harm, their
self-defense undermines existing social hierarchies, ideologies, and
identities. If we were to limit ourselves to the language of individual
rights, these interconnections would remain concealed. Violence against
women (but not only women), for example, has a gendering function,
enforcing norms of feminine subordination and vulnerability. Resistance
to such violence not only defends the body but also undermines gender
and sexual norms, subverting hetero-masculine dominance and the notions
of femininity or queerness it perpetuates. Since the social structures
and identities of race, gender, class, and ability intersect in our
lives, practices of self-defense can and often must challenge structures
of oppression on multiple fronts simultaneously.

In the following, I do not focus on the question of whether
self-defensive violence is justifiable, but rather on why it is
political; how it can transform self-understandings and community
relations; in what contexts it can be insurrectionary; and why it must
be understood against a background of structural violence. It is
necessary to clarify these dimensions of self-defense for two reasons in
particular. First, arguments advocating armed community defense too
often discuss the use of violence and the preparations for it as somehow
external to political subjectivity, as if taking up arms,
training, or exercising self-defensive violence do not transform
subjects and their social relations. The influence of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
(1961) on the early Black Panthers, Steve Biko, and others derives
precisely from Fanon’s understanding of the transformative effects of
resistance in the decolonizing of consciousness. “At the individual
level,” Fanon writes, “violence is a cleansing force. It rids the
colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing
attitude.”

The second reason for clarification is to distinguish the strategies, ways of theorizing, and forms of social relations of liberatory movements from those of reactionary
movements. There is an increasingly influential understanding of
self-defense today that reinforces a particular notion of the self—a
“sovereign subject”—that is corrosive to horizontal social relations and
can only be sustained vis-à-vis state power. This notion of the self
runs counter to the goals of non-statist movements and self-reliant
communities. To be aware of these possibilities and pitfalls allows us
to avoid them, a goal to which the following sketch of a critical theory
of community self-defense seeks to contribute.

Resistance and Structural Violence

At the National Negro Convention in 1843, Reverend Henry Highland
Garnet issued a rare public call for large-scale resistance to slavery:
“Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! No
oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance.
What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the
circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of
expediency.” I describe resistance as opposition to the existing social
order from within, and, as Garnet suggested, it can take different
forms, such as self-defense, insurrection, or revolution. We can think
of an insurrection as a limited armed revolt or rebellion
against an authority, such as a state government, occupying power, or
even slave owner. It is a form of illegal resistance, often
with localized objectives, as in Shays’ Rebellion (1786), Nat Turner’s
Rebellion (1831), the insurrections on the Amistad (1839) and Creole (1841), the coal miner Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), Watts (1965), Stonewall (1969), and Attica (1971).

Distinguishing between defensive and insurrectionary violence can be complicated. In the Amistad
case, for example, white officials initially described it as a
rebellion and thus a violation of the law, but later reclassified it as
self-defense when the original enslavement was found to be unlawful. In a
rare reversal, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the captives on the Amistad
as having selves worthy of defense. That was never in question among
those rebelling, of course, but it does indicate the political nature of
the self and our assessments of resistance. “Since the Other was
reluctant to recognize me,” writes Fanon, “there was only one answer: to
make myself known.” On the Amistad, rebellion was the only way
for the enslaved to make their selves known, meaning that their actions
were simultaneously a defense of their lives and a political claim to
recognition.

To develop a critical theory of community defense, we need to move beyond the rhetoric of rights.

A sustained insurrection can become revolutionary when it
threatens to fundamentally transform or destroy the dominant political,
social, or economic institutions, as with the rise of the Zapatista Army
of National Liberation in Mexico in 1994 and the recent wave of Arab
uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, including most
significantly Rojava or Syrian Kurdistan. The armed rebellion led by
John Brown in 1859, which seized the United States arsenal at Harpers
Ferry, was intended to instigate a revolution against the institution of
slavery. Although the insurrection was quickly put down, it inspired
abolitionists around the country and contributed to the onset of the
U.S. Civil War.

Brown’s rebellion was not a slave revolt (and thus not an act of
self-defense), but it did highlight the nature of structural violence.
Henry David Thoreau, the inspiration for Gandhi’s nonviolent civil
disobedience and, in turn, that of Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote the
most insightful analysis of this violence at the time. In his essay “A
Plea for Captain John Brown,” Thoreau defends Brown’s armed resistance
and identifies the daily state violence of white rule against which the
insurrection took place:

We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty
violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at
the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We
are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this
provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and
maintain slavery. . . . I think that for once the Sharps rifles and the
revolvers were employed in a righteous cause [i.e., Brown’s
insurrection].

In this passage Thoreau highlights how the so-called security of one
community was achieved by oppressing another and making it insecure. To
properly understand the insurrection, he therefore argues, one must view
it as a response to illegitimate structural violence. He enumerates the
commonplace mechanisms of this rule, which, for whites, fades into the
background of their everyday lives: law and order upheld by a neutral
police force, enforced by an objective legal system and carceral
institutions, and defended by an army supported by the Constitution and
blessed by religious authorities. The violence of white supremacy
becomes naturalized and its beneficiaries see no need for its
justification; it is nearly invisible to them, though not, of course, to
those it oppresses. “The existence of violence is at the very heart of a
racist system,” writes Robert Williams in Negroes with Guns
(1962). “The Afro-American militant is a ‘militant’ because he defends
himself, his family, his home and his dignity. He does not introduce
violence into a racist social system—the violence is already there and
has always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that
allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself.”

We all exist within hierarchical social structures and the meaning
and function of violence, self-defensive or otherwise, will be
determined by our position vis-à-vis others in these structures. FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover, for example, described the self-defensive
practices of the Black Panther Party as “the greatest threat to the
internal security of the country” and thus insurrectionary, if not
revolutionary. Surely his assessment had more to do with the threat
self-reliant black communities posed to white domination in the country
than with the security of government institutions. “When people say that
they are opposed to Negroes ‘resorting to violence,’” writes Williams,
“what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending
themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced
by white racists.” These structures of domination and monopolies of
violence are forms of rule that operate in the family, the city, and the
colony, and resistance to their violence, both dramatic and mundane,
“makes known” the selves of the subjugated.

‘The Afro-American militant . . . does not introduce violence into a
racist social system—the violence . . . has always been there. It is
precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system
to perpetuate itself.’

A satisfactory notion of self-defense is not obvious when we view self-defensive acts within the context of structural violence and understand the self
as both embodied and social. Writing specifically of armed
self-defense, Akinyele Omowale Umoja defines it as “the protection of
life, persons, and property from aggressive assault through the
application of force necessary to thwart or neutralize attack.” While
this is appropriate in many contexts, the primary association of
self-defense with protection does not capture how it can also
reproduce or undermine existing social norms and relations, depending on
the social location of the self being defended. Describing the effects
of his defense against a slaveholder, Frederick Douglass, for example,
wrote that he “was a changed being after that fight,” for “repelling the
unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant” had an emancipatory effect
“on my spirit.” This act of self-defense, he asserts, “was the end of
the brutification to which slavery had subjected me.” Our understanding
of self-defense must, therefore, account for the transformative power of self-defense for oppressed groups as well as the stabilizing effect of self-defense for oppressor groups.

Social Hierarchies and Subject Formation

To see how self-defense can have several effects and why a critical
theory of self-defense must, therefore, always account for relations of
domination, we need to understand in what way the self is both embodied and social. By embodied
I mean that it is through the body that we experience and come to know
the world and ourselves, rather than through an abstract or disembodied
mind. The body orients our perspective, and is socially visible,
vulnerable, and limited. Much of our knowledge about the social and
physical world is exercised by the body. Our bodies are sexed, raced,
and gendered, not only “externally” by how others view us or how
institutions order us—as, for example, feminine, masculine, queer,
disabled, white, and black—but also “internally” by how we self-identify
and perform these social identities in our conscious behavior and
bodily habits. By the time we are able to challenge our identities, we
have already been habituated within social hierarchies, so resistance
involves unlearning our habits in thought and practice as well as
transforming social institutions. As David Graeber writes, “forms of
social domination come to be experienced in the most intimate possible
ways—in physical habits, instincts of desire or revulsion—that often
seem essential to our very sense of being in the world.”

Self-defensive violence can transform self-understandings and
community relations; it can be insurrectionary; and it must be
understood against a background of structural violence.

Since our location within social hierarchies in part determines our
social identities, the self that develops is social and political from
the start. This does not mean that we are “stuck” or doomed to a certain
social identity or location, nor that we can simply decide to identify
ourselves elsewhere within social hierarchies or somehow just exit them.
To be sure, we have great leeway in terms of self-identification, but
self-identification does not itself change institutional relations or
degrees of agency, respect, risk, opportunity, or access to resources.
These kinds of changes can only be achieved through social and political
struggles. Our embodied identities are sites of conflict, formed and
reformed through our practical routines and relations as well as through
social struggle. Since the actions and perceptions of others are
integral to the development of our own, including our
self-understanding, we say that the self is mediated, or is formed through our relations with others in systems of production, consumption, education, law, and so forth.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois
theorized black life in a white supremacist society as experiencing
one’s self as split in two, a kind of internalization of a social
division that produced what he called “double-consciousness,” or “this
sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of
measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity.” Although one may view oneself as capable, beautiful,
intelligent, and worthy of respect, the social institutions one
inhabits can express the opposite view. Part of the experience of
oppression is to live this othering form of categorization in
everyday social life. Even when one consciously strives to resist
denigration and to hold fast to a positive self-relation, the social
hierarchy insinuates itself into one’s self-understanding. In the most
intimate moments of introspection, a unified self-consciousness escapes
us because our self-understanding can never completely break from the
social relations and ideologies that engender it. Social conflict is
internalized, and it takes great strength just to hold oneself together;
to live as a subject when others view and treat you as little more than an object,
and when you are denied the freedoms, security, and resources enjoyed
by others. Ultimately, only by undermining the social conditions of
oppression through collective resistance can the double-consciousness Du
Bois describes become one.

Racism produces race and not the other way around. Racial categories
emerge from practical relations of domination, unlike ethnic groups,
which are cultural forms of collective life that do not need to define
themselves in opposition to others. Racial categories are neither
abstract nor biological, but are social constructions initially imposed
from without but soon after reconfigured from within through social
struggles. As with all relations of domination, the original shared
meanings attributed to one group are contrary to the shared meanings
attributed to other groups and, thus, often exist as general
dichotomies. This oppositional relation in meaning mirrors the
hierarchical opposition of the groups in practical life—a fact that is
neither natural nor contingent.

Masculinity and femininity, for example, are not natural categories:
they are social roles within a social order and thus have a history just
as racial groups do. Yet, like those of race, the social and symbolic
relations of gender are not contingent. Indeed, masculinity and
femininity exhibit a certain kind of logic that we find in every
institutionalized form of social domination. Because gender is a way of
hierarchically ordering human relations, the characteristics associated
with the dominant group function to justify their domination. Group
members are said to be, for example, stronger, more intelligent, and
more moral and rational. Nearly every aspect of social life will reflect
this, from the division of labor to the forms of entertainment.

In reality, the dominant group does not dominate because it is more
virtuous or rational—indeed, the depth of its viciousness is
limitless—but due to its dominance it can propagate the idea that it is
more virtuous, rational, or civilized. “The colonial ‘civilizing
mission,’” writes María Lugones, “was the euphemistic mask of brutal
access to people’s bodies through unimaginable exploitation, violent
sexual violation, control of reproduction, and systematic terror.”

The fundamental dependency of the oppressor on the oppressed is
concealed in all ideologies of social domination. Although the very
existence of the colonist, capitalist, white supremacist, and patriarch
relies on the continuous exploitation of others, they propagate the idea
of an inverted world in which they are free from all dependencies. This
is the camera obscura of ideology that Karl Marx discusses in The German Ideology (1845–46).
The supposedly natural lack of autonomy of the subordinated groups is,
we are told, the reason for social hierarchy. Workers depend on
capitalists to employ and pay them, women need men to support and
protect them, people of color require whites to control and decide for
them, and so forth.

Resistance to domination reveals the deception of this inverted
world, destabilizing the practical operations of hierarchy and
undermining its myths, for example of masculine sovereignty, white
superiority, compulsory heterosexuality, and capital’s self-creation of
value. Violence and various forms of coercion support these myths, but
such violence would be ineffective if some groups were not socially,
politically, and legally structured to be vulnerable to it.

While self-defensive practices can’t eliminate vulnerability, they can undermine it as a structuring principle of oppression.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or
extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated
vulnerability to premature death.” Indeed, to be vulnerable to violence,
exploitation, discrimination, and toxic environments is never the
choice of the individual. Any radical liberatory agenda must therefore
include among its aims the reduction of such group-differentiated
vulnerabilities, which would strike a blow to many forms of social
domination, including by not limited to race. This is not to say that
vulnerability can be completely overcome. The social nature of our
selves guarantees that the conditions that enable or disable us can
never be completely under our control, and those very same conditions
render us vulnerable to both symbolic and physical harm.

Turning specifically to consider self-defensive practices, while they cannot therefore eliminate
vulnerability, they can reduce it for particular groups and undermine
it at a structuring principle of oppression. Training in self-defense,
writes Martha McCaughey in Real Knockouts (1997), “makes
possible the identification of not only some of the mechanisms that
create and sustain gender inequality but also a means to subvert them.”

The Politics of Self-Defense

If we accept a social, historical, and materialist account of group
and subject formation, and understand that groups are reproduced with
the help of violence, both mundane and spectacular, then we can see why
self-defense functions as more than protection from bodily harm. It will
also be clear why self-defense is not external to questions of our
political subjectivity. If we acknowledge that we are hierarchically
organized in groups—by race, gender, and class, for example—which makes
some groups the beneficiaries of structural violence and others
disabled, harmed, or killed by it, we see how self-defense can either
stabilize or undermine domination and exploitation.

Self-defense as resistance from below is a fundamental violation of
the most prevalent social and political norms, as well as our bodily
habits. As McCaughey writes: “The feminine demeanor that comes so
‘naturally’ to women, a collection of specific habits that otherwise may
not seem problematic, is precisely what makes us terrible fighters.
Suddenly we see how these habits that make us vulnerable and that
aestheticize that vulnerability are encouraged in us by a sexist
culture.” Organized examples of resistance to this structured
vulnerability include the Gulabi or Pink Sari Gang in Uttar Pradesh,
India; Edith Garrud’s Bodyguard suffragettes, who trained in jujitsu; as
well as numerous queer and feminist street patrol groups, including the
Pink Panthers. McCaughey calls these self-defensive practices “feminism
in the flesh,” because they are simultaneously resisting the violence
of patriarchy, while reconfiguring and empowering one’s body and
self-understanding. We could similarly think of the self-defensive
practices of the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Deacons for Defense and
Justice, Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement as anti-racist, as decolonization in the flesh.

Organized examples of self-defensive resistance include the Gulabi or
Pink Sari Gang in India, Edith Garrud’s Bodyguard suffragettes, the
Pink Panthers, the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Deacons for Defense and
Justice, Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement.

Although self-defense is not sufficient to transform
institutionalized relations of domination, unequal distributions of
resources and risk, or the experience of double-consciousness, it is a
form of decolonization and necessary for other kinds of mobilizations.
The praxis of resistance is also an important form of self-education
about the nature of power, the operations of oppression, and the
practice of autonomy. When conditions are so oppressive that one’s self
is not recognized at all, self-defense is de facto insurrection, a
necessary making oneself known through resistance. While the
most common form of self-defense is individual and uncoordinated, this
does not make it any less political or any less important to the
struggle, and this is true regardless of the mind-set or intentions of
those exercising resistance.

We must, however, also be attentive to how resistance, and even
preparations for it, can instrumentalize and reinforce problematic
gender and race norms, political strategies, or sovereign politics. A
critical theory of community self-defense should reveal these
potentially problematic effects and identify how to counter them. There
is, for example, an influential pamphlet, The Catechism of the Revolutionist
(1869), written by Sergey Nechayev and republished by the Black
Panthers, which describes the revolutionist as having “no personal
interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no
property, and no name.” This nameless, yet masculine, figure “has broken
all the bonds which tie him to the civil order.” But who provides for
the revolutionist and who labors to reproduce the material conditions of
his revolutionary life? Upon whom, in short, does the supposed
independence of the revolutionist depend?

Although the machismo and narcissism here is extreme to the point of
being mythical—George Jackson said it was “too cold, very much like the
fascist psychology”—it does speak to a twofold danger in practices of
resistance. The first danger is that self-defensive practices are part
of a division of labor that falls along the traditional fault lines of
social hierarchies within groups. Men have, for instance, too
often taken up the task of community defense in all contexts of
resistance, which has the effect of reproducing traditional gender
hierarchies and myths of masculine sovereignty. Considerations of
self-defense must therefore be intersectionalist and aware of the
transformative power and embodied nature of resistance, as discussed
above. The group INCITE!, for example, seeks to defend women, gender
nonconforming, and trans people of color from “violence directed against
communities (i.e., police brutality, prisons, racism, economic
exploitation, etc.)” as well as from “violence within communities
(sexual/domestic violence).”

The second danger is a commitment to the notion of a sovereign
subject, which is the centerpiece of authoritarian political ideologies
and motivates so many reactionary movements. The growing number of white
militias, the sovereign citizen movement, as well as major shifts in
interpretations of the Second Amendment and natural rights, are
contributing to an increasingly influential politics of self-defense
with a sovereign subject at its core. For this sovereign subject—whose
freedom can only be actualized through domination—the absolute
identification with abstract individual rights always reflects an
implicit dependency on state violence, much the way Nechayev’s
revolutionist implicitly relies on a community he refuses to
acknowledge. The sovereign subject’s disavowal of the social conditions
of its own possibility produces an authoritarian concept of the self,
whose so-called independence always has the effect of undermining the
conditions of freedom for others.

Although one objective of self-defense is protection from bodily
harm, the social and political nature of the self being defended makes
such resistance political as well. Self-defense can help dismantle
oppressive identities, lessen group vulnerability, and destabilize
social hierarchies supported by structural violence. The notion of a
sovereign subject conceals these empowering dimensions of self-defense
and inhibits the creation of self-reliant communities in which the
autonomy of each is enabled by nonhierarchical (and non-sovereign)
social relations being afforded to all.